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Brain candy for Happy MutantsTue, 31 Mar 2015 18:00:17 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1HOAX: TV show tricks chronic catcallers into harassing their own mothershttp://boingboing.net/2015/01/26/tv-show-tricks-chronic-catcall.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/26/tv-show-tricks-chronic-catcall.html#commentsMon, 26 Jan 2015 17:00:44 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=360197Update: These are staged -- it's an ad for Everlast, and not a TV show as I had believed.
The Peruvian TV show "Harassing Your Mother" performs secret makeovers on the mothers of habitual catcallers, then uses hidden cameras to record catcallers shouting sexual remarks at their own mothers, who furiously upbraid them in the middle of the busy streets of Lima.]]>

Update: These are staged -- it's an ad for Everlast, and not a TV show as I had believed.
The Peruvian TV show "Harassing Your Mother" performs secret makeovers on the mothers of habitual catcallers, then uses hidden cameras to record catcallers shouting sexual remarks at their own mothers, who furiously upbraid them in the middle of the busy streets of Lima.

Yesterday, guest blogger Madeleine Johnson had a story here about a piece of ancient Peruvian pottery — in the shape of a very grumpy little cat. If you haven't read her story, you really should. It's all about the great cat memes of ancient history and how archaeologists can use clues from an artwork to track down who made it, where, and when.

My friend Andrew was kind enough to adapt Ancient Grumpy Cat into the form of a modern cat meme. That's his picture above. Madeleine and I also put together another one, based on Ancient Grumpy Cat's probable history as a ceremonial mug for drinking a corn beer called chicha:

]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/08/01/ancient-grumpy-cat-lols.html/feed0Meet Ancient Peru's own Grumpy Cathttp://boingboing.net/2013/07/31/meet-ancient-perus-own-grump.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/07/31/meet-ancient-perus-own-grump.html#commentsWed, 31 Jul 2013 12:00:40 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=246416Grumpy Cat, Shocked Cat, Lil Bub – their images are the currency of the web, passed between friends, family, and co-workers.]]>Grumpy Cat, Shocked Cat, Lil Bub – their images are the currency of the web, passed between friends, family, and co-workers. When they go viral, funny cat pictures heal daily drudgery with a dose of furry, cuddly cheer. But, in terms of the reverence they receive, these cats are hardly the first of their kind. Ancient cultures had cat memes too, and archaeologists have their own term for them: feline motifs.

The word meme, itself a meme, feels ultra-modern, but was coined in the 1970s by Richard Dawkins to refer to any non-genetic unit of replicated information. And it would be chronocentric to presume this term applied only to the proverbial Caturdays following its contemporary articulation. Some archaeologists, known as evolutionary archaeologists, incorporate memetics into their explanations of cultural transmission and change. In their view, cultural evolution, or the speciation of different cultures, happens by selective forces acting on cultural memes, motifs and styles.

We can look back about two thousand years and see cat memes on objects made in the Americas before Columbus set boot here. In fact, the feline motif is a powerful point of acccess to Pre-Columbian cultures, as it was a common from the Mississippi to the tip of South America.

MEET OLD GRUMPY CAT

Take a dour little kitty artifact that resides in the American Museum of Natural History. He is Grumpy Cat’s distant cousin. Let’s call him Old Grumpy Cat, or OGC. Museum officials call him a ceramic bottle, and say he probably came from Northern Peru. Created about 2,000 years ago, he was likely used for special ceremonies, then part of a burial. Centuries later, he was dug up by grave looters and sold to collectors, ultimately making his way to his museum home and an afterlife of staring at the world from behind glass.

The vessel was not excavated by academics, so we don’t know exactly where, or when, he is from. Since soil accumulates in layers year after year, archaeologists usually determine age of objects that can’t be carbon-dated by their relation to other objects within the same deposition layer. No such luck with Old Grumpy.

Knowing what species is represented could offer a critical clue, but Old Grumpy is ambiguous. This line of thought, however, can still lead to useful insights.

For example, wild cat conservationists in South America point out that historically-rooted feline reverence makes cat-hunting less likely, helping preserving the ecosystems they inhabit. Even if not sacred per se, cats can be symbols of the regions they inhabit, a source of pride, which, conservationist argue, can save cats’ lives.

Archaeology can also provide data for biologists, as in a recent case in Mediterranean fish biology. Conservationists identified grouper, a species now endangered in the area, in pre-Christian mosaic art. This allowed estimates of the size of ancient groupers and their historic ranges, thus putting an endangered species into a bigger timeline.

SO, WHERE IZ I FROM?

Archaeologists like to group cultures by their ceramics. In Northern Peru, steep mountain ranges abut Pacific beaches. Ancient peoples thrived along rivers that run perpendicular to this coastline. Coastal cultures rose and fell in these valleys over thousands of years, each with a signature style of pottery.

Nearly a dozen archaeologists that I spoke with agreed that the color and pattern of Old Grumpy Cat suggest the Virú river valley in Northern Peru.

OGC’s creators used a technique called resist glazing, in which wax was pressed onto a fired pot to make a design. It was then dipped into liquid glaze, which could not adhere to the waxed areas. When the pot was fired, the glaze became glassy and the wax melted away, leaving behind the design. Archaeologists most often attribute resist style to a group that inhabited the Virú valley between 500BC and 1000AD; however, there is ambiguity. On the North coast, resist style was also used by a slightly earlier culture called the Salinar, the later cultures of Chavín and Moche, as well as a culture up the coast called Vicús.

Beyond this decorative style, the people of the Virú valley are known also to have used small, not so fierce looking feline motifs in their ceramics. OGC represents a small spotted cat with striped front legs. This motif had wide currency in the region, as it is also found far to south in petroglyphs associated with the Wari people.

The feline meme evolved, and the time of the Inca (about 1400AD), the most commonly depicted cat was a jaguar, whose meme was so stylized it could be represented by its fangs alone. Some archaeologists propose that meditation on the jaguar meme became a shamanistic ritual, in which ceramic bottles held corn beer called chicha: OGC’s little tail is actually a drinking spout.

SPEESHEEZ, PLEEZ?

Old Grumpy Cat was probably not meant to be a realistic portrait. Even 2,000 years ago, it’s unlikely there were cats with spiral spots. There were no housecats (domesticated Felis sylvestris) in the Americas then, but there were small wild cats. Was Old Grumpy Cat meant to depict one in particular?

There are now ten species of wild cat in South America, eight found in Peru. Each species can look a little different depending on age and location. So, although he doesn’t look much like an adult jaguar (Panthera onca), for example, OGC could be a jaguar kitten. Or a puma (Puma concolor), an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), or even a margay (Leopardus weidii).

However, the striping on his front legs of suggests one of two species in particular.

The Andean mountain cat (aka Leopardus jacobita) is the rarest small wild cat in the world, and the only endangered wild cat in the Americas, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. If Old Grumpy Cat was modeled on this species, he might now have good reason to be frowning. The very existence of living L. jacobita was only confirmed in the past 20 or so years, and its high and dry mountain habitat is very rapidly disappearing as climate change melts the glaciers of the Andes.

DNA evidence confirms modern Andean cat scat about 200km south of the Virú valley, near the scene of the meme.

The other possible species is the Andean cat’s cousin, the Pampas cat (aka Leopardus colocolo). Pampas’ appearance is more variable than the Andean cat, but at the Northernmost reaches of their range Pampas cats tend to have striped legs and tails, with some spots on the back, just like OGC. Indeed, biologists often use genetic tools to definitively distinguish between Andean and Pampas cats, by analyzing DNA that is sloughed off from the cats’ intestines into their droppings.

Even if their historic ecological range brought them near the Virú valley, could the makers of Old Grumpy cat have distinguished Andean cats from Pampas cats by eye?

Besides the handful of biologists who have seen them in the wild, local herders and villagers in the Andean mountains know the difference.

From 1998 to 1999 and 2001 to 2002, a conservation study in Bolivia quizzed mountain residents with photos of the two cats. They lump all small wild cats together into a group they call “titi,” but researchers found that about 18 percent of people considered there to be two different kinds of titi. Moreover, they had different names for the two titis, and described them as living in different habitats with distinct mannerisms.

The Pampas cat was called gato chaskoso, or scruffy cat, while the Andean cat was called gato sonso, or silly cat. The rare sighting of either cat is considered to bring good fortune, but seeing scruffy cat is good luck in general while silly cat brings a good harvest and protects livestock. In fact, according to researchers, locals believe that accidentally killing a silly cat creates a debt to nature that must be atoned annually, and the stuffed pelt is decorated with streamers and kept as household talisman. This modern cat reverence tracks with archaeological hypothesis about the roots of cat worship. Ancient farmers observed that small wild cats killed rodents that would otherwise eat up their crops. Cat health and well-being was a concern of these early agricultural societies.

I IZ WHAT I IZ.

Taxonomy is a way of charting relationships between things. It is a modern and scientific way of seeing the world. In terms of the lumping and splitting of ancient cultures or modern cat species, descendants of Andean cultures might have another perspective. When asked what species OGC is, archaeologist Nick Saunders points out that the Western urge for taxonomy is not always in sync with indigenous reality.

In ancient, and modern, Andean cultures, “either a one-for-one identification is inappropriate, or different features of different felines (and/or other animals) are recombined in ways which made eminent sense to their creators but totally confuse us,” he wrote.

For example, jaguar spots could be painted on a depiction of another animal, to endow that animal with jaguar powers.

Taxonomy means saying an object or animal is THIS and NOT THAT. In modern Andean cultures, there’s evidence of a less binary way of thinking. The Aymara language (spoken by about two million people throughout Peru and Bolivia) conceptualizes time with the future behind and the past is laid out in front of a person, analogous to being a passenger in a rear-facing train seat. Speakers point to their back when gesturing about future events, and forward when describing the past.

Aymara also uses a three-part, or ternary, logic system. In addition to TRUE and FALSE there is a third, equally valid option, meaning something similar to "not enough information." This has also been called Andean logic. Ternary logic systems can be really useful in describing the universe, be it the universe of perception or a set of data: consider the NULL state, used in databases to distinguish an entry that does not exist from one that represents nothing.

It is only fitting, then, that Old Grumpy Cat defies categorization. He pops out of his museum case, suddenly seeming more relevant because of his resemblance to Grumpy Cat. Maybe he has something to say about climate change effects on wild cats of the Andes, or maybe he tells of sophisticated and underappreciated indigenous people of the Americas, both ancient and modern. Maybe the spiral on the side of Old Grumpy Cat represents time, and overlap of culture and generations in the same physical space. If we assume time will continue into the future (whether we envision that as in front or behind us), perhaps future archeologists will find a Grumpy Cat coffee mug 2,000 years from now and wonder about us.
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http://boingboing.net/2013/07/31/meet-ancient-perus-own-grump.html/feed0Death and the Mainframe: How data analysis can help document human rights atrocitieshttp://boingboing.net/2013/06/25/death-and-the-mainframe-how-d.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/06/25/death-and-the-mainframe-how-d.html#commentsTue, 25 Jun 2013 13:00:43 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=238285Between 1980 and 2000, a complicated war raged in Peru, pitting the country’s government against at least two political guerilla organizations, and forcing average people to band together into armed self-defense committees.]]>Between 1980 and 2000, a complicated war raged in Peru, pitting the country’s government against at least two political guerilla organizations, and forcing average people to band together into armed self-defense committees. The aftermath was a mess of death and confusion, where nobody knew exactly how many people had been murdered, how many had simply vanished, or who was to blame.

“The numbers had floated around between 20,000 and 30,000 people killed and disappeared,” says Daniel Manrique-Vallier. “But nobody knew what the composition was. Non-governmental organizations were estimating that 90% of the deaths were the responsibility of state agents.”

Manrique-Vallier, a post-doc in the Duke University department of statistical science, was part of a team that researched the deaths for Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Their results were completely different from those early estimates. Published in 2003, the final report presented evidence for nearly 70,000 deaths, 30% of which could be attributed to the Peruvian government.

How do you find 40,000 extra dead bodies? How do you even start to determine which groups killed which people at a time when everybody with a gun seemed to be shooting civilians? The answers lie in statistics, data analysis, and an ongoing effort to use math to cut through the fog of war.

Violent conflicts don’t usually leave behind the kind of neat, detailed records that make it easy to seek justice for victims and prosecute killers. Because of that, witness testimony has always been an important part of understanding what happened, pretty much since we started caring about how wars affected human rights.

But there aren’t always surviving witnesses. Also, in the aftermath of war, stories conflict with one another, because different groups of people have a vested interest in seeing events in different ways. Wars often happen in places that hadn't even had accurate census data before people started killing one another. And some stories might not even get widely told, to begin with, because the people telling them are seen to be less important.

Case in point: if you only looked at newspaper reports of the Peruvian conflict, you might think that the 1990s were the most violent years. In reality, though, most of the killings and violence happened in the 1980s. The discrepancy comes from the fact that the war was being fought in rural areas at that time. When it shifted to cities in the 1990s, more journalists (who also lived in the cities) started to pay more attention.

That's really where statistics comes in handy, says Jay Aronson, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Human Rights Science. The inherent confusion of war can be used as an excuse — a reason for governments to walk away from history without seeking justice.

Data analysis allows us to get rid of the excuse that war is just messy, and sometimes people die. It’s also part of a larger trend. Over the last 25-30 years, Aronson says, civilian casualties have become more important to how we think about the aftermath of war. In order to really understand what happens to civilians you need both the detail provided by witnesses, and a sense of the big picture that comes from statistics.

A Two-Party System

So how do you turn conflicting narratives and swiss-cheese information into estimates that you can feel remotely confident about? The primary method used by scientists like Patrick Ball and Daniel Manrique-Vallier is a system called “capture-recapture” or multiple systems estimation.

The best way to wrap your head around this methodology is to start by imagining something completely unrelated to war and genocide — think of a house party, instead, says Kristian Lum, assistant research professor at the Virginia Biosystems Research Institute.

“Say there’s no guest list, but you and I want to know how many people are there,” she says. “To figure it out, we’ll start by both going into the party and collecting the names of everyone we talk to. Then we’ll meet back outside and compare the lists.”

If my list has 10 names and Lum’s list has the exact same 10 names, we can start to assume that the party is pretty small. If there were a lot more than 10 people in the house, it’s unlikely that she and I would have come up with the exact same list. But, if my list of 10 people and Lum’s list of 10 people only have a single person in common, then it’s likely that party is more on the scale of kegger than an intimate gathering of friends. The less overlap between the lists, the bigger the total number is likely to be.

In the real (and significantly less festive) world, researchers gather up all the different lists of war dead they can get their hands on. Sometimes, they’ll even do interviews with witnesses and put together a list of their own. Then, they start comparing the names — figuring out how many people are counted on multiple lists and how many are unique to a particular list.

The analysis becomes a lot more complicated than our simple party-based example, but it gives you the basic gist. It should also help you understand that the numbers produced by these kinds of analyses aren’t meant to be perfect tallies. In Peru, for example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report didn’t say that 70,000 people had died. Instead, researchers could say with 95% confidence that the number of dead fell into a range between 61,007 and 77,552. Earlier this month, when I wrote about the Human Rights Data Analysis Group’s recent report on deaths in the Syrian Civil War, I made sure to clarify that their number — 92,901 — should be thought of as the minimum number of people that have died. Not an exact count.

Pattern Recognition

That brings us to a key idea of this kind of analysis — patterns matter more than numbers. Patrick Ball of the HRDAG originally brought this idea up with me, and when I mentioned it in my piece on the Syrian deaths, I had taken it to mean that the total count of dead maybe mattered a little less than who was dying, in which parts of the region, and who they were being killed by.

In some ways, that’s true. Total numbers matter, but it’s the who, what, when, where, and why details that really help you understand if you’re dealing with, say, a standard conflict, or a more one-sided genocide. Those patterns affect the way we seek justice and how we frame the conflict for future generations. It's why witness testimony is so valuable.

But that difference between numbers and patterns refers to something else, as well — something much more fundamental to the whole concept of applying math to human rights abuses.

It’s an admission and a caveat: Any individual list of war dead is probably incorrect. Any attempt to take the numbers in an individual list and use them to understand what’s going on is likely to be misleading. In Peru, the newspapers focused on the people who died in cities. Studying those reports produced a pattern — but it was the wrong one. Likewise, when Daniel Manrique-Vallier and his colleagues interviewed 17,000 witnesses, they ended up collecting a list of 20,000 names of people who had been killed or disappeared. But it wasn’t until they put that list into context with lists from the NGOs, the Red Cross, and other organizations that a real pattern emerged in the data — a pattern which told them that far, far more people had died than anybody’s back-of-the-envelope estimates had supposed. It’s not the numbers from one list that mattered. It was the patterns that emerged when you started to compare lots of lists.

In fact, that was the point of a blog post Ball wrote last week, explaining why he couldn’t help reporters put together nifty “How the Conflict In Syria Has Changed Over Time” infographics by just handing them the raw data, i.e., the multiple lists of war dead that the HRDAG’s total count was based on.

If you were to use the raw data for the analysis, you would be assuming that the count for each day represents an equal, constant proportion of the total deaths on that day.

For example, imagine that you observe 100 killings on Thursday, 120 on Friday, and 80 on Saturday. Is there a peak on Friday? Maybe, maybe not. The real question is: how many killings really happened on Thursday? Let’s say there were 150, so you observed 100/150 = 0.66 on Thursday. Did you also observe 0.66 of the total killings on Friday? On Saturday? Again, maybe.
Or maybe not. Maybe on Friday your team worked really hard and observed 0.8 of the total killings: you observed 120 and there were really 150 (the same as Thursday). On Saturday, however, some of your team stayed home with their families, so you really only observed 0.5 of the total killings: you observed 80, but there were really 160. The true pattern of killings is therefore that the numbers were equal on Thursday and Friday -- and Saturday was worse. The true pattern could be very different from the observed pattern.

This is what I mean when I say the patterns are thing that really matters. They’re what allows us to see how many people actually died and who the dead were. They’re the things that help us distinguish between the messy aftermath of a conflict and closer-to-accurate view of what actually happened. “Our capacity to monitor is so much smaller than the universe we are trying to monitor,” Ball told me in an interview. Patterns are the things that help us see the bigger picture.

The latest round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership starts today in Lima, Peru. Embedded in the trade agreement is an IP chapter that, according to leaks, exports the worst of US copyright law -- DRM blocks, extended copyright terms, ISPs as copyright cops -- without even of the judicial and constitutional counterbalances that US activists have fought so hard for.

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Danny O'Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez,

The latest round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership starts today in Lima, Peru. Embedded in the trade agreement is an IP chapter that, according to leaks, exports the worst of US copyright law -- DRM blocks, extended copyright terms, ISPs as copyright cops -- without even of the judicial and constitutional counterbalances that US activists have fought so hard for.

In such a giant trade agreement, the Internet issues have sometime risked getting ignored by the mainstream press, and missed by the techies who'd be most affected.

But EFF's international rights director, Katitza Rodriguez, is Peruvian. She's spent the the last month working out of Lima's Escuelab hackerspace, talking to hackers, makers, journalists and artists about the dangers of IP chapter. The result has been petitions, memes, and videos, as well as meetings with politicians and articles in the Peruvian press.

http://boingboing.net/2013/05/16/eff-beats-the-trans-pacific-pa.html/feed3Redesigned cereal mascots as creepy, wrinkled costumed charactershttp://boingboing.net/2012/10/19/redesigned-cereal-mascots-as-c.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/10/19/redesigned-cereal-mascots-as-c.html#commentsFri, 19 Oct 2012 18:40:46 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=188496
Peruvian illustrator Guillermo Fajardo has taken a crack at redesigning some of the more iconic breakfast cereal mascots, uploading his excellent efforts to his Behance portfolio.]]>
Peruvian illustrator Guillermo Fajardo has taken a crack at redesigning some of the more iconic breakfast cereal mascots, uploading his excellent efforts to his Behance portfolio. There's the Trix rabbit, Tony the Tiger, Count Chocula (shown above), and Cap'n Crunch (right).

Dolphin carcasses are displayed by conservationists and environmental police officers at San Jose beach, 40kms north of Chiclayo, Peru, on April 6, 2012.

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Dolphin carcasses are displayed by conservationists and environmental police officers at San Jose beach, 40kms north of Chiclayo, Peru, on April 6, 2012. The cause of death of over 800 dolphins in the last four months on the shores of Piura and Lambayeque are still being researched, Gabriel Quijandria, Deputy Environment Minister said on April 20, 2012. More about the ongoing investigation into the possible cause of these mass die-offs: CBS News, MSNBC, AFP, DPA, CNN, (REUTERS/Heinze Plenge)